WAgile - Is Hybrid Project Management Finally Real?

WAgile - Is Hybrid Project Management Finally Real? WAgile is a hybrid project management approach that uses traditional governance and planning to establish direction while using Agile practices to continuously adapt execution based on learning and feedback. - [website] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:16Speaker 00

  All right, it's time for us to have a tough conversation. Now, I don't mean just a conversation about anything and everything. I mean a conversation about something that's been in the hearts and minds of people who've been practicing Agile for a long time. So I'm gonna take you on a little bit of a journey, a little bit of a history, a little bit of a story about something that happened that I'm pretty privy to. In fact, this almost got me thrown out of the Agile community, so let me explain. So many, many, many years ago, people were practicing traditional waterfall, plan-driven project management. It was working very well, people were happy, and everything was good. Until we discovered just how hard it was to be completely predictable and to nail the

• 1:01Speaker 00

  schedule, the budget, and the features that were going to be delivered. It was just a hard thing to do to try to get all three perfect. And then, somebody came along and said, "How about we just break things into smaller cycles, so we get more frequent feedback?" And they pulled it all the way to the opposite end of the pendulum. Well, shortly thereafter, I made a mention of something. My question was, "Why can't we do both?" And I think when I said that, it was originally misinterpreted, but now it's starting to get some traction. So I want to talk to you about a topic that I've been asked to speak about at multiple conferences now, and I'd love to speak years given the opportunity. It's about WAgile, W-A-G-I-L-E.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Some people call it the Hannah Montana theory, it's the best of both worlds, but it could also be the worst of both worlds if it's not applied effectively. Let me explain. So imagine for a moment that you're charged with building a new airplane. Would you want the engineers changing the wing designs every week based on customers' feedback? Probably not. It would make it hard to get the plane off the ground, no pun intended. But now imagine you're building a mobile app for an airline passenger. Would you want to spend two years gathering all the requirements before showing customers anything? Also, probably not. This is the fundamental problem that organizations are facing. There are certain types of work that lend itself better to a more traditional mindset.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  And there are other types of work that lend itself better to a more way of thinking in the moment time set. And I think that we need to get a balance because some work absolutely requires predictability and some work absolutely requires adaptability. Most organizations have discovered that they need both. And this is where the confusion came in. So I've heard teams use the term scrum or fall or water agile or agile fall. I've heard of all kinds of things, sometimes jokingly, but the one that I kinda coined, if you will, or I thought was better is WAGIL. So this describes organizations that combine traditional project management practices with some agile delivery focus.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  In reality, WAGIL is not a methodology or a technique at all. It's more of a hybrid operating model that attempts to balance the strengths of waterfall. Now, I can read your mind right now. Did you just say strengths of waterfall? I did. How about this? The ability to long-term plan, the ability to forecast budgets, understand governance, understand compliance, contract management and executive reporting. All of those things are strengths that a waterfall environment gives us. Now agile, we all know agile has its strengths too. Rapid feedback, adaptability, iterative delivery, continual and continuous learning, customer collaboration. The goal of this should all be very simple. And I think this is where people drop the ball.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  The goal should be to plan enough to make smart decisions, but stay flexible enough to respond when reality actually shows up. So let me tell you a little story about a large organization. Now, if you're in my classes live, I often name these organizations. Today for this one, not going to name this one. But in this organization, we'll just say it was a large organization. And they turned to, you know, they said, we want to do agile. So they went and grabbed a book off the shelf. And this is where they quickly discovered that the book on a shelf assumes that you have small teams, dedicated resources, few dependencies, flexible budgets and empowered decision makers.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  In reality, most organizations are not that organization. In reality, most organizations have fixed annual budgets, regulatory requirements, procurement processes, PMOs, vendor contracts, executive steering committees. And you can't just simply walk out onto a balcony somewhere and say, be a style, be agile. I mean, while I'd love for that to happen where everyone goes, yay, we're all agile now. The realities don't disappear when you do that. Hybrid approaches emerge because organizations still wanted the governance and they still needed the governance while pursuing better flexibility and agility. So let's talk about, so we talked about why agile fails. Let's talk about why pure waterfall struggles.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Well, traditional project management assumes that we can accurately predict the future.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Sorry, I don't know many fortune tellers that are 100% accurate. In reality, markets change, customers change, technology changes, competitors change, requirements change. The longer a project runs without feedback, the higher risk of building something that nobody wants. Waterfall excels when uncertainty is low. Agile excels when uncertainty is high. Most modern work contains both certainty and uncertainty. Interesting. So let's talk about this whole agile approach for a minute. When I bring this up to people, one of the biggest myths I hear is that, oh, this means waterfall planning with agile delivery. And I'm going to go on record and say this, and I hope I don't ruffle any feathers. That's actually one of the worst ideas I've ever heard.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Organizations stop and create massive upfront requirements, fix scope, fix dates, fix budgets, then tell all the teams, you can and should use Scrum. That's not hybrid. That's waterfall wearing agile costume.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  That's safe. That's skilled. That's what it is. It's a lot of upfront planning. The team gains ceremonies and loses all of its adaptability. Incredible. Now I feel obligated to tell you how this should work or how it does work. Because I'm telling you now, I've seen this inside of organizations and I've started presenting a deck on agile. And I'm heavily considering a class on hybrid agile project management. So what I'm saying is coming soon to a zoom call near you. We are, or even in a classroom near you. We'll talk about that later. And I, I believe that we can create something that gives you both. So here's how it works. If you think about separating and working in two layers.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  So the first layer, we're going to call the governance layer. This one is managed traditionally and it includes things like things that should be governed this way. Funding, business cases, risk management mitigation, procurement, compliance, portfolio decisions. Questions like, should we do this? How much are we willing to invest to do this? And what outcomes are expected if we do this? Layer two is a delivery layer and that's managed adaptively. And that includes backlog management, sprint execution, reviews, retrospectives, product discovery. It answers questions like, what should we build next? What did we learn from what we built last time? And how should we pivot or adjust?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  The key principle here is to understand that governance sets direction and agile determines how we're actually going to execute. So I want to make sure you understand that agile is not just a straight middle 50 50 split. It actually has a spectrum. So it's when I hear people say, oh, hybrids, one thing, just do hybrid. It's not. Some organizations do mostly waterfall where it's 90% waterfall and 10% agile. Some examples of this might include construction, aerospace, and many defense contracts because they're kind of locked in. The characteristics of those projects are heavy planning, formal stage gates and limited iteration. Then there's what's called the balanced hybrid.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  This is like large enterprise IT projects, a lot in financial services and a ton in healthcare. These characteristics are portfolio governance, agile product teams, and quarterly planning cycles. And then you have organizations that are mostly agile. This is 10% waterfall, 90% agile. Some examples of those are software startups, companies that build digital products or projects, and innovation teams that are trying to get things right. Some of the characteristics: lightweight governance, frequent releases, and outcome-focused planning. The trick is understanding where your work belongs on the spectrum and where you fit in. Now, there are some things that I've seen people try to do.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  A lot of organizations come in and they say, "We're doing agile, but we're different." And in those organizations, what I've discovered is I see a common thread of failure modes when I try to do agile, but I don't understand it. So, the first one is double reporting. Teams maintain project plans, work breakdown structures, sprint plans, status reports, and agile boards. Five different systems, one team, zero happiness. That's not gonna work, right? Here's another one. They say they're doing agile, but it's fixed everything. The organization's demanding fixed scope, fixed budget, and fixed timeline, but they'll let you do anything agile as long as it fits inside of the triangle. Something needs to flex.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Then they have what I call fake agile, or false agile, where leadership says, "We are here to adapt quickly," and then they turn around and punish changes. Teams learn, "It's better if I don't tell the truth," and all empiricism dies. And then, of course, there's governance theater. This is where you have endless steering committees, weekly status meetings, monthly reviews, quarterly audits, no decisions, and lots of PowerPoint to dictate what's gonna happen with the team. These are all terrible failures. But in a more modern hybrid model, what the most successful organizations are doing? Check this out. They're doing annual strategic planning. It's almost waterfall-like when they do that. Look for roadmaps and things that mimic annual strategic planning. Then they're doing quarterly objectives. This is kind of a hybrid model where they're combining both.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Then monthly prioritization. This is their objective stack ranking and rapid release planning. And they can do that monthly if they need to for adaptive sprint execution. Totally agile and it could be a combo on board or sprint execution. Should never be more than two weeks sprints unless it's absolutely necessary. And then continuous feedback coming from lean. And this creates real strategic stability, but also tactical flexibility. Exactly what the organization is trying to do. So if you ask me, what is agile in one sentence? I would say that agile is a hybrid project management approach that uses traditional governance and planning to establish direction while using agile practices to continually adapt execution based on learning and feedback.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  I think that makes sense. So your question shouldn't be, should we use agile waterfall? The more accurate question is which decisions benefit from predictability? And which decisions benefit from learning cycles? Elite organizations know the difference. They plan where the certainty exists and experiment where uncertainty exists. That kind of seals the deal. That's where hybrid project management becomes a competitive advantage rather than a simple compromise. That's going to do it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have a topic you want us to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye now.